


Next Christmas

by Bitterblue



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-02 23:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2829230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/pseuds/Bitterblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Delphine, second person, post 2x10.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Next Christmas

This isn't how you wanted your first Christmas to be.

There is a brief, hazy time in your memory—a few days, at most—between discovering the feel of Cosima's urgent mouth pressed dizzily to yours and discovering she is dying, she doesn't trust you anymore, she is  _dying_  and she doesn't trust you (and might never trust you). It is crammed with all of the fantasies you'd let yourself entertain even as you could see the edges start to fray around you. You imagined presents and sweaters and fires to chase away the chill from the picturesque snow outside. You imagined slow kisses and soft hands, her bed warm. Her bed  _yours_.

You glance around the café again, trying for surreptitious but probably looking more paranoid than anything else, and settle into the terminal furthest from the door, screen pointed away from the windows. It's a dank place, an anonymous internet café with bad coffee in a cheap suburb, and the few other people are actively disinterested in what you're doing as you search the installed programs on the computer.

If DYAD has followed you here, you could be leading them to her, but you don't think they have. You left Canada weeping, sobbing, desperately trying to stay, and arrived in Frankfurt the picture of a senior researcher, composed and delighted to move into a department more suited for your field. They granted you an extended Christmas leave to visit your family in Paris without hesitation. You know you're abusing their trust, that different branches don't communicate well, that these are probably good people.

You log onto Skype anyway.

Cosima—or her laptop—is online, and even though there is a very good chance it's being kept online by DYAD and monitored for this very thing, because Cosima is dead and you will never see her again, you click to make a video call. It beeps as you wait for someone to pick up, to condemn you to your fate for your betrayal, and you hastily (belatedly) plug your headphones into the jack and tuck them in your ears.

The call connects, and a voice says, "Hello?" before the video appears. You start to cry, so that the screen stays blurry even as the camera adjusts and Cosima appears on your screen. "Delphine?"

"Je t'aime, je t'aime, tu me manque, Cosima, you're  _alive_." It all comes out in a rush, muddy with tears that you smear with your sleeve ineffectively. She's shaking, and you're not sure if it's illness or crying until she sob-coughs and, of course, it is both.

"I thought you...it's been almost a month…" She seems almost stunned, and you would give anything to reach through the screen and touch her.

_Next Christmas_ , you promise yourself and her,  _we will be together and safe and healthy_. You don't promise it out loud, but it thuds in your heart hard enough that it might break your ribs. You promise. You promise. You promise.

The bell over the door clinks. Heels clink on the cheap linoleum. Cosima's bracelets clink through your headphones as she shifts, asking you questions you don't hear because the thudding is in your heart and in your head and it is drowning out all the other noise.

Two eyes, one brown and one startlingly, mechanically white meet yours.

There will not be another Christmas.


End file.
